Y2K

You make fun of it now but Y2K was believed to be a very serious issue. How dare you! Planes falling from the sky, traffic lights not working, nuclear reactors shutting down, banks resetting all our money to 0, and zombies everywhere! Are those things you just take lightly, you monster!?

I didn’t recall how serious it was at the time, likely because I was 14 and didn’t really care. It seemed like an adult problem. Granted, most of the advertised consequences were doomsday scenarios where we would all be eating canned pork and beans in dark alleys for the rest of our lives, I still assumed it was something all the smart people would take care of and thankfully they did.

January 5, 2000: “Radiation fog is light today, time to go hunt more three-dicked deer! We’re hungry!”

I remember in school we had to list out all the possible things we thought would be affected by Y2K and explain why we felt that way. A bleak exercise but a good one to get us all thinking about how the world was interconnected and this in a day when the internet was shiny, new, and quite limited. The internet itself barely registered as a potential casualty of Y2K, most of us thought about electricity, water, and money, not really understanding how everything worked.

The root of the problem is not even one worth blaming anyone over and it turns out Y2K would have been the fault of any programmer who was alive between 1955 and 1985. All bastards.  Back in the 1960’s and 70’s, programmers needed to save space and instead of making years a four digit code, like 1967, they instead opted to leave off the 19 and use just 67 to denote the year. All of those smug, Atari loving nerds believed that (1) no one would be using their programs for the next 30+ years and (2) even if they did, someone smarter would come along and fix this potential catastrophe all before it mattered. Every single one of those thick-glasses wearing, open mouth breathing, sideburn having dorks was wrong AND sexy, in their own way. Even Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted he was part of the problem when he wrote programs in the 60’s. His message to the people was basically, “Look folks, everyone was doing it. Now, you’re going to want to invest in a few tons of government peanut butter to get you through the early part of the next millennium.”

“Okay, guys, all of the nuclear codes are on this disk but we really need to get these on Dropbox or something.”

We all exhibit these attitudes in one way or another toward things we create. How many times have you saved a file to your computer and didn’t name it something descript enough because you thought (1) you’d never need it again and (2) if you did, you would remember where you put it. While that behavior is more considered lazy and the old school programmers were acting more out of necessity, the neglect to improve the system after realizing it was clearly a problem and then continue to assume that someone would one day wave a magic wand that to fix it all is something we can all relate to.

As part of my 1999ing, I watched a Y2K documentary  from 1999 called “The Y2K Crisis!” hosted by Robert Stack in all his Unsolved Mysteries glory (granted, he already seems much older in 1999 than during UM’s prime). I was surprised by the language used by high-ranking officials of both the government and major private companies. They tossed out “doomsday” and “apocalypse” regularly. They were clearly very afraid of what could happen and yet none of them knew the extent of the problem. It was an issue with a hard date, the clock was ticking, and all they knew was that it was probably going to be bad, but didn’t know what degree of bad. It would be like sitting on a time bomb and not knowing if it were full of napalm or honey mustard.

“So now you’ll just put a check beside ‘Was Not Honey Mustard’.”

Most of the fear was mongered in reaction to General Motors saying that they did not think any of their 130 factories would survive Y2K. They found this out by running a test at one of their factories they were going to shut down where they set the clocks forward to January 1, 2000 and all of their assembly lines stopped immediately. Experts forecasted that GM was not alone and that every corporation, business, bank, industry, entity, private or public, big or small, would be subject to the “bug” and every human citizen would suffer for it.

Companies poured billions of dollars throughout 1999 to correct the error with updates and tests. It’s unclear what the side effect of widespread outages due to Y2k would have meant for humanity but in the end there were very few problems attributed to Y2K worldwide. Though, the few problems detected are rather major in context, like for example, a nuclear energy facility in Ishikawa, Japan had some of its radiation equipment fail. Thankfully their backups kicked on to ensure zero fallout, but what if nuclear energy facilities worldwide had failed? Hello Fallout universe! The United States apparently detected missile launches in Russia and later blamed that on Y2K and then expected everyone to sleep tight thereafter. “No worries folks, we had that on our calendar and forgot to update it.”

“America? Yes this is Russia. Sorrrrry, we forgot to change our freaking settings on our missiles aimed at you. Silly Y2K stuff, ya know? Haha, okay, yes, I’ll hold.”

Some other, less world-ending consequences included one man being charged over $91,000 for renting John Travolta’s 1999 military thriller “The General’s Daughter.” That’s nearly half the budget to make The Blair Witch Project released the same year. A newborn in Denmark was registered as 100 years old and was somehow not named Benjamin Button. The records system at a German opera company, Deutsche Oper, reverted its dates back to 1900 and prevented employees and their children from collecting child subsidies since their children were considered to be in their 90’s, and thus, no longer children. And you thought you were a 90’s kid?

Perhaps the worst thing to come out of the hysteria was that lots of folks were stuck with Y2K survival kits. The doomsday industry really solidified itself as viable during Y2K, and today is still constantly fed to stay alive by the sweeping new fear flavor of the week. Although, not all doomsday conspiracies are bunk, after all, Y2K could have had some serious ramifications had there not been massive efforts to prevent it and COVID was no blip either. But because Y2K turned out to, very thankfully, fizzle out of memory when the power stayed on after the last midnight of 1999, millions of people were left with enough dehydrated food, water purifiers, battery-free flashlights, blankets, and waterproof matches to live in their yards for the next ten years.

“Oh this stuff? Nah, It’s for nothing weird, I just thought Y2K was going to be a lot bigger of a deal. A lot bigger.”